TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.068

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 104 lines

EDUCATION, Page 65

Lessons from On High

Project STAR takes aim at some popular misconceptions


    "Don't put the earth upside down," warns Mark Petricone as his
13 students struggle with coat hangers and pliers. "And remember,
folks, the earth isn't really in the middle of the universe. This
is an incorrect scale model, but astronomers have been using it for
a couple of thousand years."

    The goal for the juniors and seniors at Watertown High in
Watertown, Mass., is to mount a thimble-size metal earth on a coat
hanger in the middle of a melon-size clear-plastic sphere that is
supposed to be the universe. The students then use Magic Markers
to trace onto the universe a computer-drawn map of a few hundred
of the brightest stars in the night sky. They draw a line around
the sphere to represent the ecliptic, or path of the sun through
the constellations, and then they are ready for some gnarly
astronomy.

    Like the universe, Petricone's classroom is a study in
controlled chaos. "Are the Pleiades part of Taurus?" Franco
Mastantuono asks no one in particular. Classmate Lisa David
explains the difference between a crescent and a gibbous moon --
a waxing gibbous, at that. Barry Lyons solves the mystery of the
moon's phases for a visitor by drawing an impromptu diagram. "What
was the moon last night?" Petricone bellows. "A waxing crescent,"
Karyn Woodbury shoots back as she assembles her celestial sphere.
"What about tonight?" Petricone pushes. "A first quarter," pipes
another voice.

    This is classic instruction for Project STAR (Science Teaching
Through Its Astronomical Roots), a program taught in 18 schools in
13 states. STAR is based on the premise that books are abysmal
tools for learning science. "It's impossible to understand an
astronomy diagram without using three dimensions at proper scale,"
says Irwin Shapiro, the irrepressible director of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.,
and the man who dreamed up STAR six years ago. "High school science
textbooks are impossible. They are dense with concepts and jargon.
No one understands what's going on." Adds Kenneth Mirvis, who
writes STAR course materials: "This is not a curriculum of
vocabulary but of concepts." And, explains Shapiro, "facts are
easy; concepts are hard."

    In his years at Harvard and M.I.T., Shapiro has been struck by
the difficulty even well-educated adults have with basic scientific
concepts. Last year he and some colleagues produced a half-hour
film titled A Private Universe in which half a dozen Harvard
seniors were asked on graduation day to explain why there are
seasons. All blithely described how the earth is closer to the sun
in summer and farther away in winter. Wrong. The seasons result
from the tilt of the earth's axis relative to its orbit. When the
sun is highest in the sky, we have summer. In fact, the earth is
closest to the sun in January.

    Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money
from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to
correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not
merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to use
astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and
science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics
by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain
point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for
this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says
Shapiro, "and the sky is always there."

    Teachers involved in the program, which aims ultimately to
reach half a million students, spend about a month at the
astrophysics center learning the fundamentals of the STAR approach.
They are taught that the road to enlightenment lies in the third
dimension. "To convert from three dimensions to two and back to
three again leads to special reasoning ability," says project
director Philip Sadler.

    Consequently, STAR students use a variety of props. With 3-D
models of the universe, they can visualize just how the light of
the sun on the moon produces different moon phases. They make their
own telescopes from cardboard, paper-towel cylinders and plastic
lenses. (The result is a telescope more powerful than the one first
used by Galileo.) They record in journals the movement of the moon
and sun and chart the arrivals and departures of the
constellations.

    The classes, which are separate from the ordinary high school
science curriculum, tend to attract curious students and science
buffs. Still, it is often an uphill battle to disabuse kids of
fallacies that have become ingrained even by age 17. "You want to
defend your old misconceptions, but you can't," says Matthew
Liebman, a STAR student at Massachusetts' Framingham North High
School. Despite the difficulties, preliminary studies by Shapiro's
team suggest that STAR students have a better grasp of basic
scientific concepts and mathematics than students in ordinary
courses. "We're definitely making headway and in directions we
hadn't expected," says Sadler, who is continually searching for
fresh teaching methods.

    For students, the gains can be rich. Some of Sadler's initial
findings reveal that STAR  students do about 30%  better than
ordinary students in absorbing concepts and learn about twice as
much math as their regular counterparts. "I used to look up at the
night sky and say, `Yeah, so what?' " recalls Aphrodite
Kapetanakos, a Watertown junior. "Now I show my friends a
constellation and say, `Check it out!' All they know is the Big
Dipper."